Ultiduo Changes – Season Feedback + Medal Information

As you may know, we are the first and only league to offer a seasonal Ultiduo format. Unfortunately, that also means that there is a fair chunk of trial and error involved in making sure that Ultiduo fits the season structure as well as possible. This article seeks to address some of your feedback and concerns with Ultiduo, and how we plan to remedy them moving forward.

Length. This is the biggest point of feedback we’ve been receiving throughout the last two seasons of Ultiduo. You guys seem to think our season is too long, and the reward for playing in TFCL doesn’t quite outweigh the amount of time put into running an Ultiduo team. There are only 6 regular season games, spread out over the course of 6 weeks. This is, quite frankly, too long of a season, with too few games. Especially for a smaller format such as Ultiduo.

Well, we’ve heard ya loud and clear! The next season of Ultiduo will consist of 4 weeks, and 8 matches. You’ll get two matches per week, instead of the previous one. The goal is to speed up the season, while also providing as many matches as possible just so things aren’t boring for those of you competing. You know, so there’s less downtime now between matches.

Maps. Yes, we know. Our Ultiduo map pool is receiving some relatively mixed reception. Though let’s be honest here, there aren’t very many quality Ultiduo maps to begin with. I mean, other than Baloo and r7, what else is there? Maybe gullywash, if we’re being generous.

To hopefully help strengthen the Ultiduo map pool, we will be working with various talented mappers to create entirely new Ultiduo maps for use in TFCL and beyond. We’ll also begin to host our own version of the “New Map Cup”, where we test the latest and greatest maps this community has to offer. This might take several seasons though, so for now at least, you should expect the same map used multiple times throughout the season.

Yup, that’s pretty much it. If you guys have any more feedback, we’re all ears. Would love to hear about your experience playing in TFCL, and how you think we can improve our league. So just post whatever in the comments, and we’ll get right on it! 😀 \

Oh yeah, medals. Almost forgot!

So, as you all know, TFCL provides medals for pretty much everything. However, as you are also fully aware, we’ve yet to distribute them out to everybody. I’d like to touch on that in a brutally honest and open way, just so there’s no confusion or whatever.

To start off, here’s the tool that Valve gave us. It’s pretty straightforward, and unfortunately, also quite limited. We had to modify it quite extensively, as the version we were given only let us give one medal to one person at a time. That’s kinda limiting, and definitely not ideal for a league setting. So, we’ve had to modify the tool, which is why things have been running somewhat slowly. I mean, let’s face it here; we’re going to be using this tool pretty much for as long as our league remains active, so we just don’t wanna mess this up. We’ve ended up building a more or less custom tool that’ll handle medal distribution moving forward, which meant more time spent on development, and less time actually distributing the medals.

Right now, we should have everything sent out by October 10th. At least, that’s the general plan. At this point, it should just be a matter of collecting all of the steam ids, and sorting them into a text document. Then we import them into our tool, and send out the proper medals to the proper people with a single click of a button.

So that’s kinda what we’ve been doing. I know everyone and their mother has been looking for the TFCL medals, and wondering where they are. So, hopefully this article answers that. But if you’re too lazy to read it, here’s a TLDR: we got sent a very limited tool from Valve, and have been working hard to modify it so we can distribute medals. The extra development work is why we had to delay the overall distribution.